Value Network: Integrating the Five Critical Processes That Create Customer Satisfaction

An organization can prosper only by supplying value to its customers. But what in fact constitutes value? Competitive pricing and cost-effective production and distribution are merely parts of a bigger picture, says management consultant Louis De Rose.
In this ground-breaking book, De Rose presents a new and more encompassing definition of value: "the satisfaction of customer requirements at the least total cost of acquisition, ownership, and use." With step-by-step guidelines and numerous examples from actual companies, he demonstrates how to reassess and restructure your business's core activities in terms of total contribution to customer value.
The components of the "value network" are the five key processes of marketing, engineering, acquisition, manufacturing, and customer service. In effect, most businesses manage them separately - and unwittingly direct their efforts toward internal concerns rather than external results. De Rose's program reverses that profit-draining process: It shows how to create value and add value within each process, while simultaneously integrating them as an interconnected network aimed at the common goal of customer satisfaction.
The Value Network will put your organization on the road "back to basics and forward to fundamentals," as De Rose explains. Specifically, it will help you understand "value" as your customers actually perceive it; manage time, information, human resources, and financial capital for value results in all key processes; use cross-functional teams as microcosms of the value network and as organizational models for the network structure; implement value costing (also known as activity-based costing); establish alliances with customers and suppliers that enhance the company's efforts to create and add value.
"Managing for value results is a rationale that is continuing and constant," the author says. "It is a rationale that provides purpose and objective, regardless of changes in the technical, economic, and competitive environment." No matter how the business landscape may change, applying the wisdom of The Value Network will put your organization on solid ground for decades to come.

Louis J. De Rose was formerly professor and chairman of the business management department at Fordham University.